Does Meaning Require Freedom?
27 Nov 2022 - 27 Nov 2022
- See this argument all over the place (from rightwing religious types, to the Weird humanists of WS, etc).
- "If we are machines, operating only according to physical laws, we can't be free. And if we can't be free, we can't mean anything, all our words are so much mechanical gibberish".
- For the first part of this, see Free Will is Incoherent
- For the second, see How Interpreters Work on how mechanical systems can implement semantics.
Meta
- Spontaneously started writing these perennial arguments down in a hypertext form. Not sure why or if I will continue.